Wednesday, December 28, 2005

A holiday mistery: the case of Chavez's phantom anti-semite remarks and a curious ghost blogger

Scanning Venezuelan news and blogs, your favorite ghost blogger was alerted by this article about Chavista anti-semitism, written by Alex Beech

I learned that the President was reported saying the following:

“Christmas is Christ rebellious, revolutionary, socialist” and “the descendants of those that crucified Christ have taken ownership of the wealth of the world, and they have concentrated it in a small number of hands”.

The remarks appeared on December 25 in Noticiero Digital , quoted from the “minute to minute” section of El Nacional. Now, if the reader goes to the link where it appeared, the news have been replaced by today’s “minuto a minuto” news. I even checked Dec 26^th El Nacional editorial (page A6) that mentioned the Christmas message, but found nothing about anti-semitism.

Annoyed by the lack of a formal referral link and puzzled by the editorial, I started digging the official sources:

They all reported a Chavista-Christian message of love and peace, and even (see RNV, Aporrea) wrote verbatim the sentence about Christ being rebellious, revolutionary and socialist, but nothing about any descendants of those that crucified Christ.

I then checked El Universal:and, strangely, the news was cited directly from Agencia Bolivariana de Noticias (ABN).

I even went to the Alo Presidente site, and there was nothing about the latest Chavez’s comments.

Finally thanks to Google, I was able to dig this link from a Chilean site.

Also thanks to Google, I got the magnificent « cache » from El Nacional that I am pasting at the end.

So, what happened? Was Chavez misquoted? Or is there a collusion of official information sites trying to clean the damaging remarks? What about the other Venezuelan private media? Why are they not reporting or just reporting the ABN version? Why El Nacional did not emphasize in their editorial the anti-semite message that was previously reported? Is this the effect of the muzzle law? Or is everybody on vacation?